Installing XP to USB Thumb drive on d945gclf2

**bemenaker** · 12-05-2008, 03:35 PM

I just got my board today, and I am trying to get XP installed to a thumb drive. (I want my system drive to be vibration proof, will use laptop drive for cheap mass storage of media, until ssd's come down in price)

I get the first section of the cd install to work, on reboot I get the dreaded stop 7b, (inaccessible boot device).

**bemenaker** · 12-05-2008, 03:37 PM

I have used nlite to load all of the board's drivers into my XP install disc.

**DarquePervert** · 12-05-2008, 05:06 PM

Flash memory of any sort is a BAD idea for a standard-issue OS install.
Flash memory has a limited number of write cycles, and the boot drive is written to many times during normal PC operation.

There are methods to prevent writing to the boot drive. There are write-ups on these forums about that very topic.

**Bugbyte** · 12-05-2008, 05:36 PM

Hint: search for EWF.

**SFiorito** · 12-06-2008, 10:03 AM

you can't just install XP to a USB device without some extra work. See here: http://www.winusb.de/tutorial_en.html

And yes, you definitely want to use EWF and use a high end USB device, such as the ones OCZ sells that are very fast.

**bemenaker** · 12-06-2008, 11:46 AM

I know you can't just install XP to a thumb drive. I have been doing research on it for this board. I use Thumb bootable XP drives as a sys admin for work. The limited write cycles of flash ram is irrelevant, it is high enough that you can run on it for something like 10 years. (Look at ssd drives, they are flash memory).

I have used BartPE in the past but I was attempting a different method this time, hacking the install script. This is what I was following: http://www.ngine.de/index.jsp?pageid=4176

Laptop drives are prone to vibration crashes after time, but are cheap. I always intended to use that for my media files. I just wanted to boot off a thumb drive to have an OS that can't be killed by vibration. Industrial machines run off of flash drives to alleviate the vibration problems of hdd's.

**ClockWorK** · 12-11-2008, 04:28 PM

I went the opposite route. 40gig laptop drive for the OS, and a 32gig USB thumb-drive for media. The laptop drive has been solid since I installed it in June. I figure the HDD should really only be accessed heavily durring bootup (resume) and shutdown (hibernate), both of which occur while I'm parked. So I'm not really worried about HDD damage from bumps/vibration. I don't see any real HDD activity while running my CarPC. But, then again, my FrontEnd doesn't eat up a lot of resources, so there's no swap file access. Come to think of it, I might have disabled the swap file. Also, the drive is mounted vertically.

My point is that, thus far, I haven't been persuaded to make the jump to booting from flash. Yet. Maybe a Michigan winter will change my mind. Temps in the 20's this morning, but the machine worked fine. I make updates to my FrontEnd almost weekly, so mucking with EWF every time isn't something I want to do constantly either.

**bemenaker** · 12-12-2008, 09:14 AM

I really don't see the need for messing with EWF. It is common in IT to use thumb drives as a bootable OS to repair stuff. Noone bothers with EWF. SSD's don't bother with EWF. The industrial machines we use here at work that run off of CF cards don't use EWF, they use CF because the vibrations would destroy a hdd. It just really is overkill in protection. If you're that worried about it. Make your drive then make an image of it with something like Ghost and then you have a 10 second restore of you drive if it does corrupt. If you format the drive with NTFS instead of FAT you already have a fault tolerant journalled filing system and EWF is just redundancy.

For now, I have put the thumb drive idea aside and I'm working purely off a laptop hdd. Depending on how it holds up, I will re-evaluate this plan. (or if I just get bored on a Saturday and have time to kill)

**nobb** · 12-12-2008, 09:57 AM

Does CF and USB have dynamic wear leveling algorithms built in? If so, EWF probably wont be necessary. I doubt USB keys have them, but not sure about CF.

**bemenaker** · 12-12-2008, 10:00 AM

Neither do as far as I know. The read write times of flash memory have increased dramatically in the last few years. The current flash memory out there now has enough r/w cycles for 10 years of use. Flash used to die of a lot faster than it does currently. I do believe it was on TomsHardwareGuide that I read about the changes there. It was in an article on SSD's because that was a concern, but the cycle counts are much higher nowadays.